Our relationship expert Christine Webber helps a reader with the situation of his wife having an affair...

Question

We’ve been married for 18 years. I probably haven’t been a model husband, and we’ve had our ups and downs. But we have children together, and I thought we’d be a couple for ever.

My wife is still an attractive woman at 45, and since our children were teenagers she’s pursued a career in telephone sales – and that’s how she met the guy she’s now seeing.

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He’s younger. Good looking. But I doubt if he’ll be a good long-term prospect.

My wife has confessed about the affair and says she has considered leaving me. But she is very distressed and keeps crying, and our doctor has now signed her off work with stress.

Is there a hope for our marriage? I feel that if she was determined to go, and had no feelings left for me then she wouldn’t be in such a state. She has in fact ended the affair. At least that’s what she says. So do you think that her current distress is actually good news for me? If so, how can I persuade her to stay?

Christine replies...

Well, this is awful for you – and, by the sound of things, awful for your wife too.

But I agree that the fact she is so emotional and upset might suggest that she is far from sure that she should leave – particularly if she has called time on the affair. And I think therefore you should talk together about what it would take to save the marriage.

The important thing is to let her know in no uncertain terms how much you love her and how much you want her to stay. In other words, be as romantic as you can while you fight your corner.

Though she is the one who has been unfaithful, there has doubtless been blame on both sides. Maybe you have failed to listen to her, or to be the kind of companion she wanted. Maybe you weren’t considerate enough in bed. Or perhaps when the children were small you were busy with your own career and didn’t give her enough support.

Usually when people stray there is a reason: something that has made them feel that their actions are justified. And often that reason can be buried in the past. So it would be well worth having a think about the 18 years you’ve been together and trying to identify what may have gone wrong from her point of view.

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If you can apologise for past wrongs and any hurt you may have done, this may go a long way towards healing the current situation. I also think if you can talk privately together as calmly as possible when your children are not around then you may find that you can both say things to each other that you haven’t been able to discuss for years.

I suggest that you also go to Relate. Most experts would agree that when a marriage has come under this kind of strain it has a better chance of survival if the couple get some relationship counselling.

And I would like to recommend a good book by Julia Cole: it’s ‘After the affair – How to build love and trust again’, published by Vermilion.

I hope that you can stay together. It’s always worth trying hard to keep a marriage intact. And I think you are probably right in assuming that if your wife had no real reason to remain wedded to you, then she might well have gone by now.

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